Here, in brief, is his own preferred method:
Clean the beans of any pebbles, clods of dirt, and other detritus, rinse them of dust, and put them in a large pot with a teaspoon of salt for every pound of beans. Top them with three inches of boiling water, cover them, and put them in a preheated 250—F oven. Cook until done, adding more boiling water occasionally to prevent them from boiling dry.
All this is pretty terrific. It has cleared the air, replacing dubious lore with a basic method of cooking dried beans that is simple, direct, and good. However, it’s also important to bear in mind that cooks often do not themselves know why they do the things they do, and so the reasons they give may be completely off the mark. Taste a spoonful of bean-soaking liquid sometime and you’ll discover that there is barely any flavor to it at all. Diana Kennedy’s resistance to discarding it was primarily a visceral one, an act of allegiance to the Mexican cooks who taught her their bean-cooking secrets. It was this, not the truth of any rule, that flavored her pot.
Similarly, Matt and Ilike to presoak our beans (we also cook them in that water), and so—despite the above—we still do. Not only is it a pleasure to watch them plump up during the course of the day, but the sense of connection that comes from this coddling adds to our anticipation of the meal. Consequently, I value Russ Parsons’s piece less for its new rules than for the way it calls back into consciousness rote behavior that kept me from noticing that different beans have different needs—and reminds me that my job as cook is, before all else, to attend to them.
EXISTENTIAL PIZZA
In the summer of 1936, two budding French intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, traveling together through Italy, paid a visit to Naples. The city fascinated them both, and each night in their hotel, Sartre poured out page after page of impressions in the letters he sent back to Paris. He was especially entranced by the dreamlike intermingling of public and private life. In hot weather, the poor simply lived in the street, dragging out chairs, tables, even beds. In the afternoon, entire streets would fall sleep, the inhabitants—even passersby—just dropping off wherever they happened to be: waiters on top of their tables; musicians slumped against their instruments; a young man curled up among the stems and leaves in the same flat basket from which he had just been selling fruit. The few people who remained awake appeared to be caught between naps, with “reddened eyes and a pensive look, as though remembering one dream or just embarking on the next.”
And, everywhere, people ate and ate. De Beauvoir had remarked of Rome that it was a city without a stomach; in Naples, however, the stomach was always evident. Bowls of tomato paste were stuck out into the street to dry; onions hung in thick ropes. Although these were neighborhoods plunged into direst poverty, the street food available there was so cheap that it seemed almost no one was denied it. Children in rags wandered about gnawing on huge chunks of bread stuffed with cooked peppers or with their faces buried in thick wedges of watermelon. Vendors could be found in every alley, selling “nuts, boiled ears of corn, grilled fava beans, fish, crustaceans, small squid.”
What poverty did mean was a blurring of the usual distinction between vendor and customer. Anyone with a little money would buy something and try to sell it to his or her neighbors to make a little more money. Often, that something was food or drink. A vendor of lemonade was someone who had bought two lemons, filled a bucket with water, and sat down on a bench with these, two glasses, and a lemon squeezer. Sartre observed:
You give him two cents, he wakes up, squeezes the lemon into the glass, pours in a bit of water, andvoilà: lemonade.
Sartre found thenapoletani to be neither a resentful, downtrodden proletariat nor a merry band of opera-singing paupers. They defied categorization and, for that matter, caricature by their ability to take nothing and make it into something. Poverty might force them to live in squalor, but the ways in which they utilized that squalor could be delightful and profound. The streets abounded in surrealistic juxtapositions:
a basket of fruit beside a barrel organ… a plate of tomato paste drying beneath a picture of the Virgin… an oven drawer, full of hot coals, laid on a rickety chair.
At one point, de Beauvoir wanted a bite to eat, so they entered a pizzeria. It was little more than a tiny white room with a counter and four tables covered with white cloths, one of which was occupied by four fat naval officers in white uniforms, consuming pizza with glasses of red Vesuvius wine. However, most of the pizzas were sold from a stall in front of the shop.
Through the store window and open door we could [hear] the pizza vendor, with red hair and long decaying teeth … singing, in an odd and very Neapolitan sort of nasal singsong, with flourishes and scoops, to attract customers…. A mass of tattered, squealing little boys would crowd around him; the cook, a handsome young Neapolitan, would bring out the steaming pizzas…. [The] vendor would take up a pizza, fold it in two, and put a thick slice of cheese inside. It’s more rudimentary than in Rome, where the cheese is melted into the pizza.
If Sartre had been more interested in pizza,23he would soon have noticed that it isn’t only in Rome that the cheese is melted on top; what he saw served at this place was certainly not “authentic.” Even so, it wasreal Neapolitan pizza, and if, as Sartre would come to claim, existence does indeed precede essence, his account casts an illuminating light on the narratives of two more recent travelers, Edward Behr and Burton Anderson, both food writers and, in this instance, both in hot pursuit ofla vera pizza napoletana.
Burton Anderson, who devotes a chapter to the subject in his book about Italy’s most famous foodstuffs,Treasures of the Italian Table, arrived in Naples confidently expecting to confirm his belief that “the supremacy of pizzanapoletana is founded on the quality of local products.” When, instead, he discovered that his favorite Neapolitanpizzaiolo used canned tomato pulp instead of fresh tomatoes—and, worse,seed oil instead of olive oil—to make what Anderson himself had to admit was a completely delicious pizza, his whole thesis quietly self-destructed.
The truth is that Neapolitan pizza is good for reasons that, while not indifferent to the quality of the ingredients, are not entirely dependent on it, either. Edward Behr, in his essay “Pizza in Naples,” is ensnared in the same belief, and at times it is hard to tell how much of what he says is the exception today—“The tomatoes that go on pizza are traditionally used raw, whether cut up or crushed in a simple purée, although some are now canned”—and how much the rule. When he asks a producer ofmozzarella di bufala —the authentic stuff—how much he sells topizzerie, Behr is astonished by the answer: “None.” Pizzerias don’t use it; it is too expensive and, anyway, when it melts, it reduces to a translucent sheen—not what the customer expects.
Even so, Behr’s observations of thepizzaioli at work touch the heart of the mystery.
Thepizzaiolo’s only secret is experience. All his work except the preparation of dough and lighting of the oven is done in full view of those who come to eat.
He watches the expert shaping of the dough, the final addition of the topping, the small shovelful of wood shavings tossed on the fire when the pizza is pushed into the oven. This makes the flames leap up, a burst of heat that helps raise the edge of the crust—thecornicione —and cook the top in the single minute it is in the oven. When it is brought to his table,
the surface of the pizza is here and there flecked with black; sometimes, without apology, it is blacker than that. The underside has tiny charred spots as well.
Notice the charred bits on the crust, but also consider the import of that phrase “without apology.” This, I think, gives us the essential clue.
Anderson, in another chapter of his book—this one on the Tuscan artisanal baker Carlo Cocollino—describes in minute detail the making of his loaves, which are hand-shaped and baked in a wood oven. When Carlo extracts them, they emerge
the size of pillows with mottled shadings of tan, powdery buff, and charcoal amid welts, ripples, craters, and crevices
that resembled relief maps of the surface of the moon.
These loaves demand a social interaction that factory-produced loaves do not. They encourage customer participation at least to the extent that they offer a choice among objects that, were they identical, would offer none. Some people, in fact,do prefer a bit of char on their crust.
However, I think this interaction involves something more than choice. We can see it best by considering the pizza that most of us are familiar with from years of patronizing our local pizza parlor. The formula for American fast food plays on our naïve delight in having something good given to us over and over again in the exact same way. The problem with this, as it turns out, is that the only way to improve on this pleasure is to intensify the sameness. The cheeseburger becomes the double cheeseburger becomes the double cheeseburger with bacon.
So, too, the pizza with sausage and cheese becomes the pizza with double sausage and double cheese. This approach gradually polishes away all the edges from what was once real street food. I mean here, literally, the crusty edges of the grilled burger, the burned onions—the chef pushing things to the limit. At an Italian pizzeria, intensification of sameness—although many of the pizzasare the same—is not the issue. Eaters there relate to the spin that a particularpizzaiolo gives to his pie.
That spin can be a general statement—thin crust versus thick crust, real mushrooms versus canned mushrooms, real tomatoes versus canned tomato purée—but it is also something spontaneous, personal, that makes this pizza just that much different from that pizza. The result is pizza with personality, and you don’t get personality just by heaping on the cheese. You can find such pizzas in serious pizza cities in this country—New Haven, say, or New York—where pizzas manage to be good, better than good, and still remain, like the guys who make them, tight and muscular.
If I myself had ever had the chance to go to Naples, I also would have visited pizzerias, torn crusts apart, sniffed cheese, rolled the tomato topping around in my mouth, looking for something—a clue, a technique, a special ingredient—to bring back home. But is this the point? If I had looked around, I would have realized that, as much as it is food, pizza is a social event, a waynapoletani have of enjoying life—thepizzaiolo as well as the customers. They might live entirely for the moment, but out of that moment they know how to squeeze a lot.
Given this, perhaps we can propose a definition that wraps Sartre’s, Anderson’s, and Behr’s pizzas in the same fraternal embrace. Authentic pizza is, first of all, delicious crust. It is a topping that complements, even enhances, that crust. It also somehow embodies—even radiates—the craft that made it. Finally, it absorbs and momentarily resolves the tension between limited means and a desire to relax, have fun, eat something good. In the best possible situation, it is all these things. In America, pizza is most often a routinely made take-home food. Perhaps double cheese and double sausage is not meant as enhancement, after all, but rather as solace for something missing in our lives.
Crust. The center of the classic Neapolitan pizzeria is a dome-shapedforno, or baking oven, fired by wood to about 750—F, which can bake a pizza in one or two minutes. (A similar pizza in a professional American pizza oven takes about five times as long.24) This near-instantaneous baking provides thepizzaiolo with a constant, and at the same time constantly varying, challenge.
As the day’s orders rapidly mount from a trickle to a flood, his work rhythms also gain momentum—an intricatepas de deux with a mercurial, temperamental, even dangerous, partner. And always, of course, there is the audience to please, not as a group, but one by finicky one. The fact that his customers hardly pay attention to him is not important. It is the pizza that speaks for him, and what it says is far more interesting than anything most American pizzas have to say—including homemade pizzas.
How does one bring this spirit of controlled risk, of authentic engagement, into the home kitchen? “Thepizzaiolo’s only secret is experience.” To understand that sentence, we have to remind ourselves that a hard-workingpizzaiolo will probably make as many pizzas in a day as you or I will in a year—even a year when there is a homemade pizza on the table two or three times a week. A recipe—especially one as simple as that for pizza dough—is only the starting place, and, to the extent that a recipe is repeated over and over, very little experience can accrue.
When I wrote a pamphlet on pizza back in 1981, my project was to amass as much information on the subject as I could. I wanted to drench myself in origins, history, and ingredients, i.e., authentic ways of making it. This, given the situation and the sources, I did the best I could. Still, when I went into the kitchen, the only experience I had to draw on was my own. Flour, water, yeast, salt: I could make a dough all right, but what was it that made it apizza dough?
I had no real answer to this question. Consequently, my pizza crust was mediocre, dull, not comparable even to the pizza at the nearby Villa Rosa. It was less a pizza than a secondhand account of a pizza. As often happened to me in a situation like this, I persuaded myself that my failure was caused by lack of a real pizza oven, or, at least, real Italian pizza flour. I gave up pizza making for almost a decade.
Then, a few years ago, while developing a moist dough that would produce a light-textured, crisp-crusted loaf of bread, it occurred to us to try it for pizza. Again, the initial results were not promising: a wan-complexioned crust with the texture of leatherette. However, I was now baking all our bread and had some thoughts about where to go. To spell out what happened next would be to produce a narrative too much dominated by details—super-hot ovens, ceramic bricks, blends of various flours—that are, I think, finally incidental. Where I was heading was a destination that can be reached by many routes. What they all have in common, though, is learning—mostly by trial and error—how to sense the minute differences that make a mediocre crust into a decent one.
What I want to stress about this experience is its complex social quality: a relationship built up out of a series of interactions between the two of us, the baker and the baked. You don’t ask dough a question and get back an answer; attending involves a kind of prerational absorption and intuitive adjustment. I shaped the dough, but the dough also shaped me. It taught me to give it what it needed—to find answers to questions I hadn’t even thought to ask.
For instance, a hand-stretched dough has a tenderness and a character all its own, but for the longest time I was unable to hand-stretch this one completely because of its tendency to tear. Then, without at first noticing any connection, I developed an interest in making fresh pasta. Same flour minus the yeast and water and plus two eggs, and I had a dough that could be stretched so thin I could read a newspaper through it.
Once I was aware of what in other circumstances this flour could be made to do, some inarticulate percipience prompted a new, wholly intuitive response. The next time I made a pizza, I gave the dough a thorough drubbing with a rolling pin before I stretched it out—and found it had acquired a silky texture and was much more willing to be shaped.
For me, this act had a decisive significance, quite apart from whether the technique will stand the proof of time. I had pursued my pizza dough beyond the realm of recipe—anyone’s recipe—to the point of intimacy. Authentic? The result didn’t look like any pizza dough I had ever seen. It glistened slightly because of its stickiness; the pounding gave the strands of gluten a quilted texture. I added the topping and slid it into the oven. What came out was novera pizza napoletana, but it was our pizza, and it was finally very, very good. To the question—what was it that made it a pizza dough?—I now knew the answer. For better or for worse: me. I had become like apizzaiolo napoletano in this one way: I had accepted responsibility for my crust.
Poverty may not be the issue for Matt and myself that it is for thenapoletani, but limitations are. And each time we learn to play off instead of sidestep these, our pizzas get that much better. When we lived in Maine, two of the three basic ingredients of the traditional topping posed serious problems fo
r us. Fortunately, good olive oil was easy to come by, but fresh mozzarella was available only occasionally. And because I’ve never been a big fan of canned tomatoes, I wanted only fresh ones—locally grown fresh ones—on my pizza, which meant making it tomato-free ten months of the year.
A pizza without mozzarella or tomato sauce? Well, there was pizza in Naples before there was tomato sauce, and there was pizza there before and after for people who couldn’t afford the cheese. Indeed, the problem isn’t that it’s difficult to come up with such pizzas but, rather, that it’s all too easy. Pizza books are full of good-sounding suggestions: pizza topped with pesto, say, or with roasted peppers.
But once you decide to roast the peppers on the grill instead of taking them from a jar, chances are you’ll prefer to have them with a loaf of fresh-baked bread—which won’t obliterate their surprisingly delicate thunder and will soak up all their delicious juice. Similarly, if you prepare your pesto from scratch, you may wonder if baking it on a pizza is really how you want to treat what is, after all, a fresh herb sauce. Nothing gets on one of our pizzas without an argument—whether it belongs there at all and, if so, what it belongs there with. Consequently, any topping, however ordinary, that finds a place with us is also autobiography.
To return to the beginning: you might say that Matt and I comprise a minipizzeria napoletana of our own—at least our pizzas are certainly holding uptheir end of the conversation. They are, in other words, genuinely themselves, not an imitation, however clever or ingenious, of anything else. Even so, I would hesitate to label them “authentic.” The longer I work in the kitchen, the more confused I am about the whole subject of authenticity. I don’t dismiss it, but I am more inclined to think of it as something, like virtue, best cultivated indirectly—visible through the eyes of others, not your own.
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